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Mapping our reliance on the tropics can reveal the roots of the Anthropocene

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 7, pages 632–636 (2023)Cite this article

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Projecting and managing the feedback between tropical deforestation and global Earth system dynamics, and identifying potential critical thresholds or tipping points, will be key to our species’ future on this planet. By understanding the major historical processes that underpin the origins of this interaction, and bringing natural and social systems together in interdisciplinary models, we can evaluate the degree to which past human impacts on tropical forests resulted in observable planetary ramifications that have left legacies for the twenty-first century and beyond.

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Fig. 1: The globally critical relationship of tropical forests to different parts of the Earth system and their sensitivity to impacts from the technosphere.
Fig. 2: Historical thresholds of human–Earth-system change in the tropics.

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Acknowledgements

This work has received funding from the Max Planck Society and from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (850709, PANTROPOCENE). The authors thank G. Barretto-Tesoro for her valuable comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. isoTROPIC Research Group, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany

    Patrick Roberts, David Max Findley, Rebecca Hamilton, Victor Lery Caetano-Andrade & Noel Amano

  2. Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany

    Patrick Roberts, David Max Findley, Victor Lery Caetano-Andrade, Noel Amano & Andrea U. Kay

  3. School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Patrick Roberts

  4. School of Archaeology, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, the Philippines

    Patrick Roberts

  5. Department of Earth Sciences and Institute for Climate and Carbon Neutrality, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Jed O. Kaplan

  6. School of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Rebecca Hamilton

  7. Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

    Jürgen Renn

  8. Structural Changes of the Technosphere, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany

    Jürgen Renn

  9. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany

    Ricarda Winkelmann

  10. Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Ricarda Winkelmann

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  1. Patrick Roberts
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Correspondence to Patrick Roberts.

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Roberts, P., Kaplan, J.O., Findley, D.M. et al. Mapping our reliance on the tropics can reveal the roots of the Anthropocene. Nat Ecol Evol 7, 632–636 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-01998-x

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